What is Microsoft's Azure migration strategy?

Nathan Chai, 20th August 2014

Microsoft has begun moving two data centres and "thousands of servers" onto their flagship Azure cloud platform. In the first blogpost of a planned series detailing their cloud migration strategy, Microsoft reveal that it has been using "Microsoft Azure as the default infrastructure for new applications and workloads."

The blog details Microsoft's service deployment and operations (SDO) team's trials and tribulations moving 40,000 operating systems, located in seven datacentres spread all over the world onto the Cloud.

Microsoft SDO has credited the move to "the closure of two data centres, leased locations being decommissioned for multiple reasons," and "thousands of servers reaching end of life (EOL), with replacement requiring $200 million (£120 million) over the next five years."

Following the "All of Microsoft runs in the cloud," mantra, the software giant hopes to have removed itself entirely from legacy hardware by Q4 of its 2018 financial year.

The plan laid out shows roughly 70 per cent of the IT infrastructure located in Azure and the rest in an "optimised private cloud."

On paper the move looks incredibly simple: "Commodity workloads will move to software as a service (SaaS). New development and modern applications will move to platform as a service (PaaS). Existing applications will move to infrastructure as a service (IaaS) or remain in a private cloud."

It'll be an exciting time for Microsoft to practice what they preach as Azure has been rife with problems this month.